Wikipedia talk:Wiki Guides

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Get involved! What was your experience as a new editor? Add yours here
What resources do you think we should have ready and available to give the new users? How about resources for the Guides?
As always if you think we could have better organization here or more sections etc. be bold! It's a wiki :) What other questions do you want answers to?

Not everyone has the time to fully participate in the guides process, or wants to expand the off wiki discussions about Wikipedia editing. Have we tested the effectiveness of the various alternatives:

Wiki Guides

Improving an article written by a newbie, then issuing them with a standard welcome template.

Welcoming newbies with a templated welcome.

Not welcoming newbies.

I think I saw some stats recently which showed that welcomed newbies are marginally more likely to stay around than unwelcomed ones. But it didn't subdivide those whose "welcome" was part of a template announcing the deletion of the article they'd submitted from other welcomes. My preference is to welcome good faith editors after making a small improvement to their article such as adding a link or a category. Last night I trawled special newpages for articles creators with redlinked talkpages and was able to do this for more than twenty editors covering much of that day, I suspect that this is a more positive welcome than one from someone who hasn't collaborated with them, it also from my standpoint feels more natural to do. ϢereSpielChequers 12:15, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

I have removed my name from the list of members to the inactive list. Unfortunately I had problems with the online docs that prevented me from joining a team, since that point I have had RL commitments which have left me very little time over the last six-eight weeks. I feel that I cannot reliably keep to a three or four hour a week, or even fortnight, commitment to the project and so have had to reluctantly withdraw.

I am in a position at work where the company relies on me heavily in the period February to April but this has extended into June and possibly July and I have had less than two or three hours a week for Wiki. Although that has improved over the last week or so my other commitments, GOCE and Robotics, have also suffered and as one of the co-ordinators for the GOCE project I have had to give what little time I had available to them.

I would hope that after June things will return to a more normal level of RL part-time work at which point I will reactivate myself as a Guide.

Sorry to let you all down, I know how important this is...keep up the good work Chaosdruid (talk) 19:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi. :) I brought this up at the Welcoming Committee talk page, and User:OlEnglish pointed out that it might be within your scope. Though the message is a bit out of date, I'm copying it over here for feedback as well:

Hi. :) I'm visiting San Francisco this week and getting some interesting insight on what the Wikimedia Foundation is doing about the need of attracting and retaining new contributors. One of the new initiatives is the mood bar, which queries new editors about their editing experiences and gives them an opportunity to comment on problems they've encountered. This is already generating interesting data.

Staff mentioned that the comment fields provide us a great opportunity to reach out directly to new contributors with assistance. For example, one new contributor (who tagged his mood as "confused") left the following comment: "I am not sure if I will get the help I need and really want - my idea has been ignored for too long." The idea is that human contact from other volunteers as this point might make the project seem more accessible and help some of these newcomers become successful, happy and productive community members. Naturally, I immediately thought of you guys. :)

What I'm wondering is if any of you would be interested in responding to these people. If I created a table with the new user's usernames and their concerns if specific, would it be within your scope to proactively reach out to them to let them know that human interaction is available?

So, though I'm not in SF anymore (sooo last week), are there people here who would be interested in helping out with this? --Maggie Dennis (WMF) (talk) 19:22, 4 August 2011 (UTC)